A ‘true’ public servant: Former Idaho Democratic Party chairman dies
U.S. Rep. Richard Stallings, an Idaho Democrat who served in the U.S. House from 1985 until 1993, died Sunday in his Pocatello home. He was 85.
Stallings represented Idaho’s 2nd Congressional District, which includes eastern Idaho and now most of Boise. He also served as the chair of the state Democratic Party from 2005 to 2007, according to a party news release, and worked to re-energize the party.
Lauren Necochea, who chairs the Idaho Democratic Party, in the release said the state lost “one of its true public servants.”
“He never forgot who he was fighting for, and he never stopped showing up for the people of Idaho,” Necochea said. “He believed in listening first, leading with integrity, and fighting for the people who too often went unheard in Washington.”
Born in Ogden, Utah, in 1940, Stallings served a mission to New Zealand for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in the early 1960s, according to his House of Representatives biography. He taught history at Brigham Young University-Idaho, then called Ricks College, during the 1970s and early 1980s.
Under President Bill Clinton’s administration, Stallings served as the federal nuclear waste negotiator, the head of the only federal agency headquartered in Idaho. The office was created to find a place to store nuclear waste produced by the dozens of commercial nuclear reactors in the country, the Associated Press reported in 1995. But Stallings closed the office after about a year, saying there was little chance for success with no state willing to host a waste site.
After his four-term stint as a U.S. representative, he ran for Congress unsuccessfully twice in the 1990s, once for a Senate seat and another time for his old House seat, when he lost to Republican U.S. Rep. Mike Simpson. In the early 2000s, he instead served on the Pocatello City Council, where he was involved in efforts to increase access to affordable housing and worked to help the city recover from a $1 million debt it had when he took office.
Stallings’ wife, Ranae, died in 2015 due to complications from diabetes. The two met while students at Weber State College in Ogden in a courtship and marriage class, according to her obituary. They had three children and seven grandchildren.
Stallings in recent years was “troubled” by the direction of President Donald Trump’s administration and Idaho’s current congressional delegation. Stallings earlier this year joined former U.S. Rep. Larry LaRocco on a statewide tour to listen to Idaho residents’ concerns.
After that tour, they wrote in an Idaho Statesman op-ed that they had listened to what congressional delegates “refuse to hear.” That included “distinct fear over exploding executive authority and waning influence from Congress” and the fact that Elon Musk, an “unelected billionaire,” “took a chainsaw rather than a scalpel to our government” when he ran the Department of Government Efficiency.
The op-ed, addressed to those delegates, Republicans Rep. Russ Fulcher, Rep. Mike Simpson, Sen. Jim Risch and Sen. Mike Crapo, accused them of avoiding Idaho residents and implied that they should have joined Stallings and LaRocco on the tour.
Listening, Necochea said, is what Stallings believed in.
“Richard reminded us that politics at its best is about people, not power,” Necochea said. “It is about understanding our neighbors’ struggles and standing up for them.”
This story was originally published October 27, 2025 at 5:13 PM.
